Egg yolk painting: Jungle prints

I finally got my hands on a fantastic art book for kids - I found Discovering Great Artists
by MaryAnn F. Kohl and Kim Solga from the library and brought it home. The pages are full of art ideas for kids inspired by famous artists. I plan on doing quite a few of these projects this summer and was able to complete one with Maisy and Mina (ages 5 and 3) this afternoon.

This art project is inspired by Henri Rousseau, a French artist famous for painting jungle scenes. Our first task to get started was to go outside and collect leaves. We also grabbed a few flowers and branches that were growing in the yard.

Since I was out of green paint, I decided we would make some. Around Christmas time, we painted cookies with egg yolk paint for the first time. The colors were so vibrant - it was perfect for our bright jungle scene. I took and separated 5 egg yolks from the whites and put them into separate dishes. I wanted to be able to make several shades of green.

I let the girls add food coloring to the egg yolks and mix them together.

Our five shades of green are all ready to go.

The girls used a small sponge brush to coat one side of the leaf with the paint, then they stamped it onto their paper (I had some left over posterboard that I cut to size). Both of them got the hang of the process quickly and went to work covering their papers. They had fun using different types of foliage and flower petals to do their printing.

We let the paint dry while we ate our lunch, then I gave the girls some markers to complete their jungle scenes. I tried to take somewhat of a close up shot to show the dimension and sheen the egg yolk paint gives to the picture. It may have worked a little better if their animals were drawn before we added paint since the paint is translucent and would have made a cool effect.

Maisy's artwork is on the top, Mina's is on the bottom.

This is my first time making my own paint - I know there are several ways this can be done.